Carpenter Realtors East Irvington Now Showing Art

Vermont Farm, Frederick Polley

 

The Rich Costello Collection and Carpenter East Gallery in Irvington

The First Friday art and culture walk in Irvington on December 5 included an introduction to an amazing personal collection of works by historical Irvington and Indianapolis artists, as well as a companion show of contemporary area artists at a new art venue in the heart of Irvington. The exhibit continues its display and can be viewed at the location of the Carpenter Realtors East Irvington branch office (Carpenter East) on Washington Street, right between Jockamo Upper Crust Pizza and Sahm's Tavern and Sports Bar.  The art space is hosted by art collector and Carpenter East branch manager, Rich Costello. 

The most numerous artworks that make up the current display are by Indianapolis artist, Frederick Polley, a favorite artist of Mr. Costello. 

Many other well-known Irvington and Indianapolis artists are also included, such as Hoosier Group painter William Forsyth and his artist daughter Constance Forsyth, both longtime residents of Irvington at their former family home at the corner of Washington Street and Emerson Avenue. 

Wayman Adams and Edmund Brucker, both well-known and respected portrait painters from Indiana, can also be seen with major works in the exhibit.   

Collection Contains Many Impressive Works.

My Mother, Edmund Brucker

Greeting your eyes upon entering the Carpenter East, is the large portrait, My Mother by Edmund Brucker. The skill of this well-known artist and long-time Herron School of Art instructor is apparent immediately. The hands and face of the sitter, the countenance portrayed, are captured with care, and obvious technical dexterity. The blue background and gown convey the scene in a peaceful calm that contrasts with the warmness of the flesh-tones. A  remarkable realism is achieved, particularly in the rendering of the aged hands.

The piece is presumably a portrait of the artist's own mother, given the title. Brucker himself would have been about 70 years-old at the time, so if the sitter is indeed his mother in her nineties or thereabouts, she is quite stunning for her age.  

Brucker entered a very similar portrait, called Matriarch (1982), in the 69th Indiana Artists Show at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, held in June through August, 1983. 

Matriarch, Edmund Brucker, 1982

It is same sitter, seated and similarly dressed in both paintings. The pose is the the same – a diamond shape created with her head, arms and hands.  The Carpenter East picture is a three-quarter sideways view, whereas the IMA picture is more facing frontward. It may be that the Carpenter East painting is the superior of the two, with the mystery of the mother's glance looking somewhere out of the picture frame, portraying a a wistful contentment. The IMA exhibit piece, which won an award in the show, portrays a downward resignation, seen in the averted eyes of the matriarch. 

Couple, Wayman Adams

Another terrific piece in the Carpenter East show is Couple by Wayman Adams. The huge canvas  depicts  an early 20th Century couple, the lady dressed in a pink short sleeve and the man in a gray suit and blue dress shirt. They share a place next to each other in the intimacy of  a wood backed davenport whose curving sweep dominates the painting's foreground. 

Their bodies are perpendicular to the viewer, although not in profile, as they each look over their right shoulder to face the viewer, eye to eye. Wayman's bravura brushwork is on full display, the whole picture over. The most detailed care, in his signature way, in capturing their faces. 

This painting also has a twin of sorts. This time in the Richmond Art Museum collection – the painting The Love Seat, c. 1930, also by Adams. The pair in that painting could almost be the same two in Couple. 

In the Richmond picture, both their bodies and their heads have a more formal pose, facing ahead in the composition, as opposed to the dynamic twist of the Carpenter East painting.

Much smaller, but no less remarkable in the Carpenter East show, are several graphite drawings by William Forsyth. One is of an elderly lady, possible the artist's mother, showing her in a pose similar to both Brucker paintings; seated with  hands in her lap, and forming a diamond shape. This lady looks down, eyes averted as well, with somber expression, as Forsyth sketched away.

The intimate studies of a newborn baby nursing, shows Forsyth perfecting the baby's head in three tries, and capturing, in two separate sketches on the same page, two distinct gestures of the child's arm while feeding. One grasping toward the mother, and one less restless, relaxing downward.

Frederick Polley – Artist and Artworks.

An example of Frederick Polley Indianapolis Star page

As mentioned, Frederick Polley is well represented in Costello's Carpenter East exhibit. 

Frederick Polley lived both in Irvington and then a home studio at Paradise Hills on the city's north-east side. He taught in the art department at Tech High School for about twenty years, and later at Herron. About his early years and first artistic inspiration, we can refer to an newspaper article and interview appearing in an expansive Indianapolis Star Sunday magazine article by Aletha V. M'Naull, on January 4, 1925. 

Ms. M'Naull describes her rebuffed attempts to obtain an interview of Frederick Polley.  The subheading to the article described the state of Polley's career – Local Artist's Work Appears in Large Publications and Wins Prizes in Some of Best Exhibits Conducted in the United States. And it adds, by way of further introduction to the readers,  that, 

“Mr. Polley's drawings are appearing regularly on the page opposite the editorial page  of The Sunday Star.” 

The writer quotes Polley's self-deprecating manner when she first contacted him for a talk, 

“I am just working and am busy, but there really is nothing to tell about.”

Polley remained elusive, but she presses him further, prompting him to add,

“There is practically nothing to say.  I am putting all my spare time evenings and holidays working on some things that interest me very much, but that is all there is to it.”

Ms. M'Naull would eventually wear Polley down, and get him to speak a bit about himself and his origins of his career,

“I got my 'big lead' in a small prairie town in Illinois, where I was stationed as a telegraph operator...a sketch artist came to the town...and got...a special...edition of the...newspaper. This edition was profusely illustrated with pen and ink sketches of the station, the elevator and the prominent department stores of the town...”

Polley is presumable referring to the prominent local landmarks such at the railroad station, grain elevator and so on. He adds,

“These sketches were a revelation to me, and I found that I could sketch the buildings around me with ease and some grace. The local printer soon after gave me my first commission to draw a commercial illustration, a label for a cigar maker. I was a full-fledged commercial artist and decided that my goal was finally illustrating.”

Flatiron Building, center left, by Frederick Polley in The Star

The rest, they say, is history, as the Carpenter East show will attest. It contains original graphite drawings by Polley that were reproduced in the pages of The Star, as well as etchings, a large selection of original holiday cards of his unique and hand-made design, and original landscape paintings, several of which are on display.

The collection has the original graphite drawing of New York City's Flatiron Building that was printed in the paper in the pictorial accompanying Ms. M'Naull's article referenced above.  

Two paintings of Polley's Paradise Hills property are in the show; Paradise Hills – Polley House  and Paradise Hills – Polley House Rooftop. 

Paradise Hills - The Polley Home Rooftop, Frederick Polley

Paradise Hills refers to a large barn and parcel of land that the artist purchased in 1927, in an area just north of Fort Benjamin Harrison today. At that more rural time, the property was described as “three miles from Castleton and about five miles from Millersville on the Dandy trail, and about twelve miles from Monument circle,” according to a December 4, 1927, Indianapolis Star article with accompany photo spread.

Paradise Hills would first become the location of his studio and exhibition space, and then, some time later, his home.

Frederick Polley and his Paradise Hills Studio, c 1927

The paintings show the home and its red roof from different viewpoints on the property, both of which accentuate the hilliness of the locale.  Polley, even in the early days after the purchase of the property, would begin holding exhibitions of his work in the barn. 

Polley's inaugural open house at his new Paradise Hills studio

It should be noted that Polley also maintained an Irvington residence at the time, and would exhibit in nine of the Irvington Group shows from 1928 through 1937.

Artist Returns, Frederick Polley

Interiors and Exteriors – New Nicole Meisberger Photographs.

Carpenter East is also presenting area artists on a long wall opposite the historic collection. In the current show, three artists have work; David Lee, Nicole Meisberger and Eduardo Quixchán.

Nicole Meisberger has provided an artist statement explaining her work. She presents a series of interesting photographs from her new portfolio of Interiors and Exteriors around town. Her images run the gamut, from extravagantly baroque, to sparse – almost monotone – and banal. They are all interesting. 

Also of local interest, Meisberger's past projects are Irvington-centric.

The Inspired By series contained her image Nighthawks, derived from the source Edward Hopper painting.  Her image was shot in Irvington, with Irvington artists serving as models for the people in the painting. And Meisberger contributed to previous projects of specific note; the books 24 Hours in Irvington and Irvington Noir.

Mark Diekhoff, December 2025

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

Art Collection of Irvington Historical Society

Self Portrait by William F. Kaeser

Exhibit of Artworks from the Irvington Historical Society Collection

Currently at the Bona Thompson Center, is the exhibit An Artistic Legacy: Selections from the Irvington Historical Society Collection.  The show presents a selection of artworks from its permanent collection or on loan. 

The show coincides with the concurrent exhibit The Lost Photographs of Osbert Sumner, which continues at the same location.

Works include historic examples by members of the Irvington Group which was active from 1928 through 1937, and noteworthy pieces by more recent and contemporary artists, most with strong ties to Irvington.

Installation view detail from An Artistic Legacy show,
including Dorothy Morlan's Grey Landscape, far left

A wonderful Dorothy Morlan painting, of what may be a bend of the Ohio River, shows a bluff above a couple of cottage roofs, covered in snow, looking down over a vast river valley. The picture, Grey Landscape in this hanging, is called In the Valley (Harmony in Gray), 1933, in the book Skirting the Issue by Newton and Weiss. It is indeed musical in its interplay of varying shades of blue and gray, from very light in the skies and on the water, to more medium gray in the distant river banks, and finally a turquoise in the foreground that hosts a few thin trees that cling to a few leaves on the uppermost tips of their branches. The artist was painting near the Ohio in this period, as her Through the Trees Near Hanover appeared in the 36th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at the Richmond (IN) Art Museum in 1934.

There are two portraits of Irvington Group painter William Kaeser. One is his own Self Portrait, c. 1960, showing him at middle age, graying hair, smoking a pipe wearing a gray cardigan sweater. The canvas is brightened and its mood enlivened by the bright orange shirt he wears, and the way it plays off the small painting's teal background. Most known for his early social realistic landscapes and circus motifs, the portrait displays his sure and fluid handling of paint, where his transitions from light to shade appear skillfully executed by his touch.

Portrait of William Kaeser by Cecil Head

The second Portrait of William Kaeser, c. 1940. is by Cecil Head. Although Head did not exhibit in the Irvington Group shows, the Whiteland artist had a long association with Kaeser. They shared studio space, along with Indianapolis artist Floyd Hopper, in downtown Indianapolis on Market Street in their early days in the 1930s, and continued to exhibit together in their final years some forty years later, in a group they called The Five. 

Head's portrait shows Kaeser nearly life-size, as a young artist smoking a pipe. The play of light and shadow seems the primary study of the painting, with Kaeser's white shirt collar, the side of his neck and face and the glint off the stem of the pipe catching the brightest attention of the artist's brush. Kaeser's face, turned away, is lost in the shadow of the dark surrounding background. The portrait is similar to a self portrait by Head, and a portrait of he did of Hopper, from the same period, both exhibited decades later at the Southside Art League.

Sycamores on West Farm by Frederick Polley

Another Irvington Group artist, Frederick Polley, is well represented in the show, with three works of three varying media; painting, etching and drawing. The artist revealed his own art origins in a 1920s newspaper article that was profusely illustrated with many of his etchings. Working as a telegraph operator in a small Illinois town, he observed an artist, new to town, sketching various buildings for a feature in the newspaper. He was inspired to try his hand at sketching and found that he had talent for drawing buildings. It was a discovery and a passion that would lead to his own career in future years, when he provided etchings and drawings to be published in the Indianapolis Sunday Star across from the editorial page, for years.

In this exhibit, his colorful oil painting, Sycamores on West Farm, is first to capture one's attention with its color. The autumn scene is of a rolling slope of foreground, so often seen with him, and in this picture, a retreating row of sycamores. The gleaming white bark is bright in sunshine, amid an otherwise warm study of the fading colors as summer turns to winter. Tan and beige ground, some final yellow leaves, brown shadows and dark orange treelines in the hazy gray distance.

Polley's etching, Getting Out in the Country, c. 1927, was one his works that appeared in the Sunday Star.  There is a poetry to his composition of a towering, almost foreboding, tree on one side, mirrored by its diminutive twin on the other, in the deep, receding perspective. Between the two, the tiny hamlet of a farm –  house, barn, shade tree and split rail fence –  that huddles beneath the open expanse of open sky.  The etching portrays the same rolling topography that is familiar in many Polleys, with the massive foreground tree atop a grassy rise that plunges the eye toward the more distant and detailed narrative of the homestead at the center the piece. 

 

The Ice House, Irvington by William Lawson

A current view of Irvington, by a current resident artist, is seen in the oil painting The Ice House, Irvington, 2019, by William Lawson.  Born in Indianapolis, he studied at Herron, and currently maintains a studio on an upper floor of the historic drug store building at the intersection of Bonna and Audubon. Lawson has been painting in Irvington since his return to Indiana in 2018 after living and painting in Seattle, Washington for a number of years.

Lawson paints his Ice House, not from Ritter Avenue facing the street, but from the other side, along the railroad tracks behind the building. He often finds points of interest off the beaten track as his many paintings of the city's alleyways attest.  Views aside railroad tracks are also recur in works by this artist over the years. The light of early spring is captured as it shines on the simple, harmonious color of the scene.  The red block tower contrasts with the emerging grass. The precise stiffness of the telephone poles and roof-lines is softened by the thin billow of clouds, the fuzzy treeline in the distance and the dusty gravel along the tracks.  An old tire and other litter are not unsightly, but noteworthy to his brush. The railroad tracks do not escape, but run through. They seem to summon somewhere. Either direction, come or go, something else to see.

North Arlington Avenue at Pleasant Run by Rachel May Blount Conner

Perhaps the oldest painting of the neighborhood in the collection is Rachel May Blount Conner's North Arlington Avenue Bridge at Pleasant Run, 1885. The rustic scene, painted in a self-taught folk art style, may first appear alien to any current views at that location.  But walks along the creek in the area of Pleasant Run Golf Course do show the similar details of exposed tree roots along the washed away creek-side and eroded walls on steep inclines beside the water. The open green surrounded by trees like in her painting still exist in the southern edge of the golf course today.  The main interest in the painting is its capture of the rudimentary bridge and its stone block abutments at either end that traversed the creek at that time.

The Bona Thompson Center by Ginny Taylor Rosner

The Bona Thompson Center, 2007, a gum bichromate photograph on Lanaquarelle paper by Ginny Taylor Rosner was part of a series of works created of Irvington landmarks for the former Legends Restaurant. The work, abstracted by its extreme close up presentation, shows vines growing up the side of the building and is a study in cream yellow and green.  

Robert Selby's 1929, The Forsyth's Backyard is wildly painted with expressive slashing strokes. The picture captures the spring season with pink blossoming trees and bright new leaves. Selby exhibited with the Irvington Group, and was son-in-law to William Forsyth and brother-in-law to Constance Forsyth, both of whom are also represented in this show. The Backyard is of the Forsyth home at the corner of Washington Street and Emerson Avenue, which is the location of a gas station today.

The exhibit also contains work by three other Irvington Group members, all watercolor landscapes. Clifton Wheeler's Hillside with Cabin, Hilah Drake Wheeler's Devil's Gultch – Estes Park,  and Charles George Yeager's Untitled view of a village beside a lake surrounded by rocky hills.

Benton House by Kathleen Biale

The exhibited collection also includes works by Harry Davis, John Wesley Hardrick, Florence Bartley Smithburn, Patte Owings, James Lynch, E. Roger Frey, Kathleen Biale, Phyllis Zimmerman, and Carl Zimmerman. and continues through the end of the year.  

Mark Diekhoff, November 2025

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

'Irvington Group' Artists at Auction 2025

Gemini AI generated for illustrative purposes only

Historic Irvington Group Artists at Auction –  Autumn, 2025 

Several fine art auctions in central Indiana held in the summer and fall of this year were to feature a number of beautiful works by artists of local interest, now known as the Irvington Group. A series of annual exhibitions by artists living in or near historic Irvington were held from 1928 to 1937, sponsored by the neighborhood's Union of Clubs. A total of seventeen different artists from that era were to participate in the shows over the years.

Frederick Polley, a painter, etcher, lithographer and art instructor, and longtime Indianapolis Star contributor, lived on South Emerson Avenue in those days. He was recently represented by his oil painting, Farm Workers, in the Jacksons Auction & Real Estate Company sale in June of Outstanding Indiana, American & European Art.

Farm Workers depicts the laborers, two each, both man and beast, standing together atop a pink clay mound of bare earth at the forefront of the picture. A single tree in the green of high summer provides scant shade for the men and their plow horses. The locale could be Brown County with its gently rolling slopes of yellow grain and distant blue forested hills. The figures and animals are painted with thin dark outlines which serve to emphasize their placement in a painting otherwise dreamy and sketchy and colored in soft hazy hues.

A small watercolor  by Clifton Wheeler called Smokey Mountains  Landscape was offered at the same sale. The artist lived on Lowell Avenue with wife Hilah Drake Wheeler, also an artist. 

The watercolor is typical of Wheeler's main oeuvre of hilly and forested views of the eastern United States.  His landscapes usually pack the entirety of the realistic detail before his eyes into the picture. As a painter of summer, he mastered all shades of green and all shapes of trees.  A white homestead seems tiny, dwarfed by towering trees that roll slightly with the land before the green peak of a mountain, central to the composition.

A lovely contrast in color, technique and subject is seen in the small watercolor by Constance Forsyth painted in 1928, Industrial Scene. Forsyth, daughter of William Forsyth, lived at the family home on South Emerson Avenue (at Washington Street).

The colors in Industrial Scene are mainly two – a green for the tree and some grass, and a brick red for the linear mesh of the complex industrial building and its works. The organic features are brushed in soft, curving strokes whereas the complex, woven hodgepodge of the building is jabbed and jotted in a series of tightly intersecting marks. 

An auction, also by Jacksons, Fall 2025 Sale of Historic Indiana Art, was held on November 1, and included works of the Irvington Group. Again, in this sale, are works by Clifton Wheeler, but also paintings by William Forsyth and by Robert Selby, who married Forsyth's youngest daughter, Evelyn.

Selby's Floral Still Life, 1939, is an oil painting distinctive for the pure black of the background behind a tall silver tea pot holding a multi color of gladiolas and yellow daisies. Three green apples, one seriously overripe, complete the composition atop a brown wooden table. The mood is somber in the picture, almost funereal, due to the bleak darkness of the background and the strange gaping brown spot on the bad apple almost screaming in the shape of its blemish.

Clifton Wheeler's painting Little River, 1951, depicts a winding roadway view alongside a stream in what must be the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. The sunny roadway and its precise post and wire fence snake from front to middle of the painting which is also composed of carefully noted cedars and other bright foliage. Increasingly hazy blue mountains cascade in the distance.  Some rapids in the water and a hillside farm are the whitest bits to center the eye.

Forsyth Home (Irvington), painted in oil by William Forsyth, shows a gray autumn day, at that moment when the trees are changing to yellow, but the lower bushes still retain their green. A carpet of leaves fallen and orange cover the ground of what may be a piece of Forsyth's yard. The home is just a a slender bit of the corner of the building in deep perspective – windows, a door, some steps below and what may be a balcony rail above. The artist plays with the few colors before him, yellow, orange and brown, gray-blue and green. The stucco white wall mutely reflecting some of the color back on the overcast day, with a sky like a gray sun in a large circle formed by the curving boughs of the tree.

Another William Forsyth painting, In the Spring, 1917,  may show a small patch of garden or lawn, strewn with the decaying purple brown leaves of the prior season. It being spring, new green shoots emerge and a couple of sprigs of early season flowers, purple crocus and yellow daffodil dominate the canvas in the foreground.

Finally, Jackson's Hoosier Salon Endowment Art Auction occurred November 7. Clifton Wheeler, Frederick Polley and William Forsyth all had works represented in this sale.

William Forsyth as a srudent

A watercolor by William Forsyth, Autumn Landscape, 1896, seems impossibly modern in color given the date of its creation.  The diffuse brightness of its hues appear symbolic and abstract. Perhaps just darker paint that has faded over time. A few trees dominate the vertical painting, back-lit with yellow leaves, casting pink milky shadows toward the viewer.

A relatively rare, almost treeless, landscape by Clifton Wheeler is aptly titled A Lone Tree. The  sunny stone mountainside of the fir tree would suggest a location in the west. But the hills behind are rolling and green so it may be somewhere rocky in the east. The high drama of the trees footing amid the shadowed crags of a steep cliff-side dominate the right side of the picture, with clouds and sky and distant mountains on the left. 

 A small but elegant etching by Frederick Polley, Landscape with Trees, may show a winter scene of a few trees atop a grassy slope, as some trees appear evergreen cedars, whereas others shadow them with skeletal and lace-like bareness. His fine touch of minimal impression registers as a few delicate, thin lines sketch in the hilly countryside beyond the trees.

A companion painting by Polley, Indiana Hillside Landscape, contains a dream-like effect as its color could almost be moonlight upon the hills.  Some trees are burnt orange as if autumn, and one is spring green, although the treeline in the distance gives the impression of early winter. It is a mysterious little masterpiece in mainly shades of brown. 

Mark Diekhoff, November 2025

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

Dorothy Morlan in the 1940s – Indiana's First Modernist Painter, Part 6

seated Helen Hibben, standing left to right, Dr. S.J. Carr,  Simon Baus, Clifton Wheeler
and Dorothy Morlan

Dorothy Morlan in the 1940s and Beyond 

By the beginning of the 1940s, Dorothy Morlan was approaching her mid-fifties in age. She had been painting and exhibiting continuously for over three decades, ever since her debut while yet a student at Herron Art School in 1906. She had been honored with several solo shows over that span of time, admirable, as a trailblazing woman artist, when such shows were still called 'one-man' exhibitions, even by Indianapolis' well-known female art critic, a trail-blazer herself, Lucille Morehouse.

Morlan had thoroughly studied the local landscape through her tireless painting in the Whitewater River region south of Richmond and the Ohio River area near Hanover. She returned over and over again to studies of the flatland fields, the treelines and creeks and the endless skies near her Irvington home.  The area was still rustic around the edges and a rural idyll on the outskirts eastern Indianapolis at that time. She had painted more distant sights during extended painting sojourns along the coast of Maine and high country in Colorado. Her travels, whatever the reason – educational or personal – resulted in additional artworks around Indiana depicting the Wabash River valley at the border to Illinois, and around the country, from the Philadelphia mill country in the east and all the way to California.

She had exhibited with the Society of Western Artists in Chicago and around the Midwest, at the Indiana Artists at Herron Institute, at the Hoosier Salon, the Irvington Artists and countless regional shows in Richmond, Muncie, Lafayette and Evansville, to name just a few.  Morlan had also been chosen to participate in national shows in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.  

Expressive themes such as solitude and  expansiveness  – the order and splendor of nature  – were core forces at the root of her pictures and permeated her work throughout her career. She painted only the landscape. The color blue especially, and the variations of its color wheel neighbors; grays and greens and slates – and winter, that most solemn of seasons – captivated her artistic impulse. Nature's was the voice that spoke to her. 

She learned from influential masters of the Hoosier Group, primarily J. Ottis Adams, in her early years, and William Forsyth, as teacher, neighbor and fellow exhibitor. She learned the noble task of humble artist, with bent knee, before the wonder of the world.

Palm Beach and New York City.

In 1940, Dorothy Morlan would spend the winter season in Palm Beach, Florida with friend and fellow artist Miss Bertha Lacey. According to the Palm Beach Post, February 15, Miss Lacey had just completed her work on a portion of Indiana State House mural depicting a Civil War theme.  However, a later Indianapolis Star article dated May 29, 1940, reports that the mural project was in the Fountain County (Indiana) Courthouse, where Miss Lacey assisted mural painter Eugene Savage in the project. Both Dorothy Morlan and Indianapolis Star art critic Lucille Morehouse attended the dedication ceremony for the completed mural with a keynote address by Wilbur Peat of the John Herron Art Museum.

Around 1941, a new art gallery would be launched in New York City, headed by longtime New York sculptor and teacher, Naum Michel Los.  According to the Brooklyn Eagle paper, December 21, 1941, the enterprise was called Sixtieth Street Gallery.

A year later in December 1942, the Courier and Press (Evansville, Indiana) reported  That Dorothy Morlan had a show of thirteen paintings at Sixtieth Street Gallery in New York from November 30 through December 12. The show consisted primarily of her out-of-doors views of the Colorado Rockies and Ohio River in Southern Indiana. 

After the New York show in 1943, select paintings from the exhibit traveled to locations in Ohio, the state of her birth. Locations including Youngstown and Springfield, according to various news reports, including her hometown paper, The Salem News, in the April 27, 1943 edition.

October of Her Years.

As the mid-1940s approached, men in uniform appeared more and more in the papers as America was once again at world war.

The exhibition schedule of Dorothy Morlan decreased, at least to the extent that it was reported in the reviews. She was showing, by this time, only in the Hoosier Salon, which was held in the Wm. H. Block store in Indianapolis.

Perhaps her snub by the annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron a few years prior had soured her on that event, or perhaps she had submitted work, but it had either not been accepted or not remarked upon by the critics. The scant evidence is, more than likely, her travels and time spent for long periods in Colorado had affected her ability to exhibit in Indiana over those years.

As Lucille Morehouse reports in her art column on January 23, 1944, in The Indianapolis Star, in which she was covering the 20th Annual Hoosier Salon held at Block's, 

“In a gallery hung with oils there's a medium-sized vertical landscape design, founded on realism, in which the light gray-green of foreground field and its clumps a dark green pines and white-trunked birches, its distant deep blue mountain range, beyond which is a glimpse of snow-clad peaks, all combine to produce an effect of serenity, of dignified calm.”

Morehouse reveals that the painting is by Dorothy Morlan, in a picture called Glade in the Rockies in May.  

The description sounds familiar to a painting described earlier in this series by Morehouse in a past column, which may indicate Morlan's unrelenting efforts to capture the ephemeral moods of the mountains. She had been returning to Colorado and the Rockies again and again. Her dogged fixation on a place and a theme, much as Cezanne and his Mont Sainte-Victoire some fifty years prior. Indeed, Morehouse further reports that Morlan had just returned to her Irvington home after living two years in Colorado. 

The art critic reports further that, the previous year, Morlan had her first solo show in the East at a New York City gallery which received favorable reviews in New York papers and Art Review magazine, presumably the Sixtieth Street Gallery show.

One year following, Morehouse again discusses Dorothy Morlan in the context of the Hoosier Salon at Block's, the 21st annual, in her January 28, 1945 review. In discussing the artist's picture October, she writes,

“Miss Morlan's creative landscape is red-orange...also red-brown that blacken in the depth of shadows far back under closely placed trees. The foreground is a mass of deep, rich green. Level fields reach far into the distance – on a vary narrow strip of canvas – under a lowering sky, blue-gray and portentous.”

Lucille Morehouse may be describing a painting now called Mood of Autumn in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. If not the same painting, then nearly so.

Morehouse concludes her remarks on this picture, and the last noted Hoosier Salon of Morlan's career, with additional words on Dorothy Morlan herself, the seasoned artist, her longtime Irvington neighbor, and her fellow female trailblazing spirit, with this acclamation,

“Dorothy Morlan has been regarded as one of Indiana's most gifted women artists. October proves her ability to interpret a wild mood of autumn.”

Requiem for Singing Skies.

A young girl at her father's side. She sees him draw – marks upon the paper – a scene stolen from the world –  its earth and air, its lines, its exquisite design – enshrined in the leaves of a treasured sketchbook, to pour over later in amazement.

Dorothy Morlan was to enjoy a last major exhibit in Indianapolis in 1946. The John Herron Art Museum, along with the Art Association of Indianapolis and the Indiana Artists' Club was presenting a series of two-person shows from spring to fall that year.

Once chosen by the museum and a committee, the artist was free to act as juror and select their own works for the show. Morlan's show was scheduled, along with Muncie artist Hill Sharp, for the second iteration of the spring line-up, following Clifton Wheeler and Marie Goth.

Always an attentive observer of Dorothy Morlan's work, Lucille Morehouse would write a final time about the artist's pictures in her March 2, 1946, Indianapolis Star column about the two-person show.

“Dorothy Morlan's work as a landscape painter might be classified into several periods that include both grave and gay. Her latest painting, included in the seven richly colored oils on display, approached a type of imaginative design that borders on fantasy, and yet is linked to 'the good red earth' by its solidity of construction, its truth to natural forms in mountain peaks, meadow slopes and winding streams.”

About another picture, perhaps an even deeper foray into the realm of fantasy, Morehouse says of The Hound of Heaven,

"The artist said she was not trying to interpret the poem by Francis Thompson which has the same name, but that his 'strangely beautiful' poem stimulated her as she developed the design. As the 'hound' leaps through the sky, farm animals flee frantically across the green meadow slopes.  The black tree masses of the foreground have been treated in a fantastically decorative manner by thin curving white lines – suggestive of trunks and branches – that might have been made with an ancestral quill pen in the early Spencerian handwriting.”

Morehouse discusses another canvas, smaller, again fantastic in theme, The Afternoon of a Faun, which continues the new theme of adding creatures to her landscape by adding the mythological faun beneath the writhing branches of a musical willow in the fore. Additional works include Autumn Sweeps Out to Sea and The Burning Bush. 

Morehouse describes in more detail the two final contributions to the show by Dorothy Morlan. 

Of Requiem, Lucille Morehouse writes these fitting  lines about a Dorothy Morlan painting,  

“...inspired by an unusual light on a mountain peak in Colorado...the glory of silver and rose tones transfigures the blackness of middle-distant ranges and foreground pines so that the depths become reddened and enriched with deep dark color."

And about Here Where the World is Quiet she writes, 

“The first line of Swinburne's poem 'The Garden of Proserpine' suggested the name – has gently rolling hills, a deep blue stream that widens into a pool, guarded by fantastic trees, and, in the far distance, above the long horizontal line of level country, is another shorter horizontal line of silvery smoke from a passing train that is not in sight.”

At that moment in time, the latest war over, a new era for America was set to begin. A moment when European artist refugees, having traveled to our shores, brought even newer modernist ideas of surrealism and abstraction. Those latest modes of painting, reactive, birthed as a defense mechanism to the raw horrors of wars and crimes too terrible to conceive, let alone portray head-on in art. It was a neurotic moment infused with angst and anxiety that would change the direction of art forever, and establish for the the first time, with the emergence of the New York School, the preeminence of America in art.

And at that same moment, Dorothy Morlan paints an evolution to the expressive modernism she had always pursued. Her expressive interpretation of music and sight, feeling and color, mythos and nature. She seemed at a crossroads, an existential predicament shared by everyone on earth since the invention and use of the atomic bomb. 

Not long after the 1946 show, Dorothy Morlan was to suffer a debilitating stroke that left her unable to paint. The details are lacking, but it is mentioned in two books covering Morlan; The Irvington Group, 1928-1937 in a piece by Sheri A. Patterson, and Skirting the Issue by Judith Vale Newton and Carol Ann Weiss.    

It is somewhat surprising that Dorothy Morlan's condition was never mentioned by Lucille Morehouse in her Indianapolis Star columns in the years that followed. The careers of the two women intertwined to an amazing degree, and the fact that they were Irvington neighbors for fifty years or more would lead one to believe that Morehouse knew intimately the details of Miss Morlan's medical case. But any knowledge along those lines seems to have remained private.

Dorothy Morlan was to die in October of 1967.

(It is noted that that neither Dorothy Morlan's notice of death or her obituary in the Indianapolis newspapers mentioned any prior medical emergency from years past or details about her final years.) 

A last photograph of Dorothy Morlan appeared in the September 24, 1951, Indianapolis News. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Irvington Union of Clubs, a pictorial spread was printed. The undated photograph shows past participants of the Irvington Artists exhibitions sponsored by the Club.  Miss Morlan, and fellow artists Simon Baus and Clifton Wheeler, are admiring Helen Hibben holding an artwork, while longtime exhibition host and sponsor Dr. S. J Carr looks on.

******* 

Morlan first appeared in print at age twenty with her impressions of the last day of February, 1902. In particular, her astute observation of a winter morning giving way to spring. Her writing, infused with poetry, sang of the movement of clouds and the mood of a changing wind. 

Her last words appeared fifty-five years later in an October 2, 1957,  'letter to the editor' of The Indianapolis Star. 

There is no poetry to be found, unfortunately, in her well-reasoned remarks about the meaning of democracy versus republic as she weighed-in obliquely on the Little Rock segregation debate. Her mind seems rational and coherent, but in a topical manner absent any expression of dream, any feeling of solemnity, any awe. Her medical condition seemed to have sapped her introspective spirit by then. These last public remarks come across as shouting at the clouds, clouds that sang to her their beauty for so long.   

Postscript.  

Printed July 21, 1947, Lafayette Journal and Courier

50 Years Ago Today (in the Lafayette Morning Journal)

“Miss Lucille E. Morehouse, a graduate of Purdue, has taken a position on the Lafayette Journal staff, and will devote most of her time to society and literary work. She is regarded as a young lady of more than ordinary ability.”

Printed January 28, 1958, Indianapolis News

Fifty Years Ago (1908)

“A painting by Miss Dorothy Morlan of Irvington was accepted for the exhibition of the work of American artists at Philadelphia.”

Mark Diekhoff, August 2025

See Also:

The Irvington Group, 1928-1937 

Skirting the Issue by Judith Vale Newton and Carol Ann Weiss.    

both books available at the Irvington Historical Society